October 21, 2007

Bob Guccione Jr. Lays an Egg .. for Discover Media

Quote: "While most print companies are desperately trying to become multi-platform companies, Discover Media sold off its discover.com Web address to Discover Card for about $5 million."

Not buying an obvious generic name is one thing ...but selling your existing address to raise cash is poison ... Particularly so if you're in the "publishing" business.

Now his company gets to rebrand, recreate search engine links and reputation .. old archived stories would have to be republished and re-indexed. Quite a potential mess depending on how active the discover.com domain was.

This is the equivalent of having the gold in the palm of your had and giving it away because you didn't understand what you had. Completely foolish.

Reminds me of when the Mail.com sold off all those generic domains for a few million bucks. That was a much bigger gaffe than this -- because if anyone knew the value of domain names, it was (supposed) to be the folks at Mail.com.

Assuming the company was worth only $20million then selling off the web address for $5million doesn't sounds like an obviously bad idea to me. Would be interesting to know what kind of revenue their site was bringing in for them. Unless the company was really reliant on that one address (ie probably a lot of purely internet based companies) I don't think many would turn down 25% of their net worth for the sake of changing their url.

***FS*** I wonder how much of their 20mm in revenue was predicated-on/compromised-by that change Snoop. Imagine if CNN had sold CNN.com as it was getting started.. lost momentum .. confusion due to change.. opportunity cost. Not as if Discover media is a pipe company changing their name from utube.com

You are wrong about Mail.com. They did own all those domain names. Asia.com, India.com, Lawyer.com, Doctor.com, Email.com, and hundreds more incredible generics, all of which they sold to their former CEO for practically nothing.